As with so many other things in life, exercise may work best if you follow the Goldilocks rule: exercise neither too Magic slim Capsule little nor too much, if your goal is to shed extra weight, a new study finds.Previous research has shown that exercise alone doesn’t reliably lead to weight loss — without accompanying restrictions in diet — a dismaying fact that many hopeful weight-losers know firsthand.But a recent Danish study suggests that physical activity can indeed help shrink your pants size, so long as you hit the sweet spot — perhaps somewhere around a half-hour a day, at least for young men.For the study, researchers at the University of Copenhagen recruited 61 sedentary and moderately overweight men, mostly in their 20s and early 30s, and randomly assigned them to one of three groups: a control group that remained sedentary with no changes to diet or activity; another group that took up a 30 minutes-a-day routine of moderate exercise like jogging or biking (each participant worked out for either half an hour or until he burned 300 calories); or a third group that exercised more vigorously, for an hour a day or until they burned 600 calories.TIME.com: Should you drink if you’re training for a race?Before launching into the 13-week exercise regimen, all the men underwent a baseline checkup to gauge their overall health and fitness: all were overweight but not obese, and they were metabolically healthy.During the 13 weeks, the men were instructed not to make any purposeful changes to their eating habits; they also kept food diaries that the researchers checked later, and on certain days they wore motion sensors to track how much activity they were engaging in outside of their exercise routines.By the end of the 13 weeks, the results were both expected and unexpected, the researchers reported.Not surprisingly, the sedentary group saw no changes in their weight. The men in the high-intensity exercise group lost an average of 5 pounds, but while weight loss was expected, the researchers said these men lost about 20% less than they would 3X Slimming Power have anticipated, given how many extra calories they were burning.Even more surprising were the results from the moderate exercise group: these men lost an average of 7 pounds each, 83% more than what the researchers would have guessed based on calorie expenditure alone.